Site Mobile Navigation

Iraqi Officials Declare Charter Has Been Passed

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 25 - Iraqi electoral officials officially announced Tuesday that voters had passed a new constitution, paving the way for parliamentary elections in December. But the constitution narrowly escaped defeat, as Sunni Arabs turned out in large numbers to vote against it.

The electoral commission said that although 79 percent of voters approved the constitution in a referendum on Oct. 15, three provinces voted against it, two of them by a two-thirds majority. Under election rules, if two-thirds of voters in each of three provinces had voted against the constitution, it would have failed.

The overall vote was sharply divided along ethnic and sectarian lines: Shiites and Kurds, who make up about 80 percent of the population, generally supported the document.

The high turnout by Sunni Arabs was a marked change from last January, when many of them boycotted elections. American officials have hailed their participation as the opening of a dialogue with the Sunni Arabs and as a sign that members of the Sunni-led insurgency could still be persuaded to participate in the political process. That, the Bush administration says, is the best hope for a reduction in the number of American troops in Iraq.

While Sunni Arabs appear willing to participate, they remain hostile to Shiite and Kurdish rule. The constitution was mostly written by Shiites and Kurds, and some Sunni Arab groups insisted that electoral fraud had helped its passage in some provinces.

Now, the Sunni groups appear to be mobilizing for a large turnout in elections for the National Assembly in December, in order to make major changes to the constitution and to obstruct the aims of Shiites and Kurds by having a Sunni Arab voice in the government.

"I think we must be interested in the next elections, because we can change the constitution through the next assembly," said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a dentist and senior official in the National Dialogue Council, a hard-line Sunni group. "The Sunni Arabs want to get more power back."

The constitution will take effect after the elections in December.

To reach compromise on this constitution, Iraqi politicians had put off addressing dozens of crucial issues, leaving those up to the next National Assembly.

They include the division of oil resources and the exact process by which regions will be able to declare autonomy from the central government. Sunni Arabs fear that Shiites and Kurds will try to enshrine language allowing them to form oil-rich independent states within Iraq, and so they are girding for battle in the new assembly.

Resentment among Sunni Arabs could flare, however, if they find it difficult to achieve their political goals, especially because they are certain to remain a minority in the government.

Even as Sunni Arabs work inside the system to exert political pressure, the steady rise in the number of Sunni-led attacks during the past two and a half years, like the triple bombing on Monday near two hotels in downtown Baghdad, raises questions about whether passage of the constitution will have any significant effect on the guerrilla war.

The document's approval "will convince many Iraqis who said 'no' to this constitution that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis respect it," said Hussain al-Shahristani, a deputy speaker of the National Assembly and a conservative Shiite politician. "However, there will always be terrorists linked to the previous regime, or international terrorists who come from the outside who will refuse to accept this constitution."

Statistics released by the electoral commission on Tuesday show that 55 percent of the voters in Nineveh had rejected the constitution, short of the two-thirds threshold.

Two Sunni-dominated provinces, Anbar and Salahuddin, overwhelmingly rejected the constitution. If 83,283 of the 322,869 people who had voted "yes" in Nineveh had voted "no" instead, the constitution would have been defeated.

In other words, the vote in Iraq came down to a small group of voters -- less than 1 percent of the total turnout -- in one particular area of the country. On Tuesday, the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group that had supported the constitution, said that voter fraud had occurred in Nineveh.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In the mixed Sunni-Shiite province of Diyala, 51 percent of voters supported the constitution. If 85,544 of those had voted "no," the document would not have passed.

The Iraqi electoral commission, at the suggestion of United Nations advisers, had also audited a sampling of provinces in which more than 90 percent of voters had approved the constitution.

Officials said Tuesday that they had found no evidence of voter fraud in those provinces, which were Basra and Babil, dominated by Shiites, and Erbil, a Kurdish province in the north. The officials said it is standard international practice to scrutinize vote tallies when numbers are so heavily for one candidate or one side of an issue.

The final results came as a wave of violence roiled the country. Three suicide car bombs exploded in and around the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, killing at least 9 people and wounding 15, an Interior Ministry official said. A car bomb in the oil city of Kirkuk killed at least three Iraqi soldiers and wounded three others, and a roadside bomb south of Baghdad killed at least three more Iraqi soldiers.

In Baghdad, a car bomb killed a civilian and wounded five others; a bomb at a Sunni mosque killed one person; and gunmen shot dead three police officers, one security guard and a ministry official in three separate attacks.

The American military said Tuesday that two marines were killed in a roadside bomb attack last Friday in western Iraq. It also said a soldier died Saturday of wounds he suffered in a roadside bomb attack in Samarra, Iraq, on Oct. 17.

The terrorist group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posted an Internet message on Tuesday claiming responsibility for the bombings in Sulaimaniya and for the Baghdad bombings on Monday, which it said were directed at "the crusaders and their midgets" and which killed at least six people.

Those attacks and recent statistics from the American military suggest that the political process has done little to win over Sunni Arabs hostile to the new order.

The number of attacks per week has risen gradually since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, despite the transfer of sovereignty in mid-2004 and the elections in January 2005, major political events that Iraqi and American officials hoped would dampen the insurgency.

In February and March 2004, the American military counted just fewer than 200 attacks per week on average. A year later, that number had risen to about 400. In late September, the average was nearly 600, and it rose to 723 the first week of October.

The ceaseless violence has spurred some American commanders to say that there may not be an easy political solution to this war, and a protracted struggle could continue well after the December elections and the installation of a full-term government.

"Historically, successful counterinsurgency operations take nine years," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American command, said in an interview. "We are a nation that wants to rush a solution, but you don't solve a problem like this overnight. This war has to be won on the battlefield."

In the long run, the people who are going to have to do that, he said, are the Iraqi security forces.

John F. Burns contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.